70.

It was 6:15 in the morning, still raining as it had yesterday. Not a downpour but steady. Drinking coffee, Crow was putting on a Kevlar vest in a van at the construction site at the start of the causeway. Peter Perkins had slipped the radio into his hip pocket and was running the microphone and earpiece wires. When that was done, Crow strapped on two .40-caliber semiautomatic handguns below the vest, and slipped into a hooded sweatshirt. The microphone was clipped inside the neck, and the hood concealed the earphone.

Paul Murphy came into the van wearing work clothes. He poured some coffee for himself.

“There’s a crack in the seawall,” he said, “on the ocean side. I put a tenpenny nail in there and hung the dummy on it, just below the top of the wall.”

Crow nodded, and drank some coffee.

“The timing is everything here,” Jesse said. “You can’t have Amber up there with you too soon, or Esteban may not shoot. On the other hand, she’s got to be up there in time for the old man to see her getting shot at.”

Crow nodded. He was impassive as he always seemed, but Jesse thought there was a ripple of electricity beneath the surface.

“Esteban’s got to pass this site to get out on the Neck. When he does we’ll know it.”

“State cops?” Crow said.

“Sitting tight in the parking lot of the post office,” Jesse said. “’Bout four blocks that way.”

“People at the other end?”

“Yep.”

Crow nodded, flexing his hands a little.

“You nervous?” Jesse said.

Crow shook his head.

“I like to go over it,” Crow said. “Like foreplay, you know?”

“I’ve always thought about foreplay differently,” Jesse said.

Crow shrugged.

“Romero will be with Francisco,” Crow said. “He’s the stud. If somebody needs to get shot down, shoot him first.”

“You know him?”

Crow shrugged.

“We move in the same circles,” he said. “Rest of them will just be routine gunnies.”

The back door of the van was open. Crow looked out at the rain.

“Guess it doesn’t make so much difference where the sun’s coming from,” he said.

“Rain’ll take care of that,” Jesse said.

Crow nodded. He took a deep breath of the wet, salt-tinged air.

“Rain’s good,” he said. “Rain, early morning, hot coffee, and a firefight coming.”

He grinned and nodded his head.

“Only thing missing is sex,” he said.

“We pull this off,” Jesse said, “you get to keep the dummy.”


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